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A fantasy, a serenade
and a fantasie add up to “American Serenade,” apparently, since that is the
title of the new Warner CD featuring violinist Rachel Kolly d’Alba.However you mix them together, the works are
a study in contrasts, and are very well played – although the three are
somewhat out of keeping with each other thematically and expressively.The Gershwin fantasy is actually an
arrangement by Alexander Courage (1919-2008), and it includes a number of the
“greatest hits” themes of Porgy and Bess,
just as the very well-known Carmen
Fantasy by Franz Waxman (1906-1967) contains quite a bit of instantly
recognizable music from Bizet’s last and greatest opera.These two works are virtuosic and on the
“popularizing” side of things, giving Kolly d’Alba plenty of display
opportunities while also allowing her to dip into a sort of swooning
emotionalism – a surface-level thing, true, but affectingly communicated.Bernstein’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium (1954) is made of sterner stuff,
or at any rate more-serious stuff.A
five-movement work that seems to call for three soloists – on violin, harp and
percussion – in reality it uses the violin most prominently and has the effect
of a violin concerto. But this is a concerto with narrative purpose, based on
the varied statements in praise of love made by different characters in Plato’s
work: Phaedrus, Pausanias, Aristophanes, Eryximachus, Agathon, Socrates and
Alcibiades.The philosophical
underpinning makes this a deeper work than the other two here, and in fact it
helps to know Plato’s dialogue to get the full flavor of Bernstein’s
music.Kolly d’Alba and conductor John
Axelrod do not treat the piece with any particular depth, but it is well-played
and comes across as an interesting contrast to the two lighter works here – and
lasts as long as both of them put together.

The works on a Naxos
CD called The American Trumpet are
mostly short, and they are varied enough so the disc will be of interest
primarily to lovers of the instrument’s sound and of modern American classical
composers – or sort-of-classical ones, such as Stephen Sondheim. He is heard
here in two Sweeney Todd excerpts
from 1979, arranged by Jeffrey Silberschlag and orchestrated by William Thomas
McKinley, himself represented by the interesting and witty Miniature Portraits (1988), the longest work on the CD.Silberschlag is not only the soloist but also
the dedicatee of a number of these pieces, and the fact that conductor Gerard
Schwarz is himself a trumpeter guarantees idiomatic and ebullient performances
throughout.One of the Naxos re-releases
of music originally heard on Delos, this CD was recorded in 1994; thus, nothing
here is later than that date, but several pieces were brand-new when the
recording was made. They include Leo Eylar’s bright Dance Suite, David Froom’s Serenade,
and the revised version of Steven Rouse’s Enigma-Release
from The Avatar (originally written
in 1951).Also here are Invocation (1962) by Robert Starer and
the warm and attractive Notturno
(1944) by John Carbon.This is a mixed
bag of music, to be sure, but it is all very well played and constitutes an
enjoyable survey of some American composers’ recent thinking about the trumpet.

The prolific
Mark-Anthony Turnage thinks in multiple directions and multiple forms, and as
Composer in Residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (2005-2010)
created a wide variety of works for orchestra with and without soloists.Five of his pieces are collected on a new LPO
disc featuring various soloists and conductors – “variety” seems to fit pretty
much everything Turnage does.On Opened Ground (2000-2001) is a viola
concerto, Riffs and Refrains (2003) is
a concerto for clarinet, and Mambo, Blues
and Tarantella (2007) is one for violin – and the only one of the three
written while Turnage was in residence with the LPO.So this CD is really built around the
concerto format, with Turnage handling each of the works differently and to
different effect.The two non-concerto
pieces here do both date to Turnage’s residency: Lullaby for Hans (for string orchestra) was written in 2005 and Texan Tenebrae in 2009.There is a certain facility and slickness to
Turnage’s music that keeps it approachable at the cost of a degree of
superficiality.Most of it is strongly
influenced by jazz, which is scarcely unusual in classical compositions
nowadays but in Turnage’s case is more apparent than in many other composers’. Marin
Alsop, a strong advocate of modern American music and therefore quite familiar
with jazz inflections, does a particularly good job in the two works she
conducts, but Markus Stenz and Vladimir Jurowski also handle their
contributions very well. All the soloists do a fine job, and the orchestra is
clearly very comfortable with Turnage’s style and handles all the works very
admirably indeed.Turnage’s music does
not tend to stay with a listener long after it ends, but much of it is quite
pleasant while actually being performed.

The music of Tan Dun
tends to have more aural staying power. Still best known to many listeners for
his score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon (2000), Tan is far more than a film composer, and continues to
explore new sonic worlds that combine such influences as John Cage, Philip
Glass and Steve Reich with classical training and frequent reminiscences of his
upbringing in Hunan, China.The earliest
work on Naxos’ new CD, Orchestral Theatre
(1990), is the most closely connected to that upbringing, including
considerable amounts of folk music and the folk-music sound along with
Western-style orchestration and forays into atonality.The other two works here are both new,
written in 2012. Symphonic Poem on Three
Notes has a fairly ordinary musical arc – nature to industry and back to
nature – but some intriguing aural effects, thanks to Tan’s well-known fondness
for sonic sources not usually considered instrumental. In this case, he uses
wind, stones and the brake drums of cars to contrast the natural world with the
industrialized one. Concerto for
Orchestra is a tribute of sorts to Marco Polo, its four movements recalling
elements of his journey to the East while also trying to reflect his imagined
spiritual progress: “Light of Timespace,” “Scent of Bazaar,” “The Raga of
Desert” and “The Forbidden City.”It is
“Raga,” the third and longest movement, that is most effective at
scene-painting, but Tan manages to convey exoticism and the spirit of
exploration throughout.He is also an
effective interpreter of his own work, which the Hong Kong Philharmonic
Orchestra plays quite well. After a while, Tan’s music starts to pale a bit, and
the works on this CD are of more interest when listened to one at a time than
when heard straight through. But they will certainly be attractive to listeners
interested in a composer who manages to meld Eastern and Western influences with
an unusual degree of facility and, often, felicity.